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Automate Manual Tasks to Take Back Your Day

If you’re like most sales, e-commerce, and marketing teams, you face an overwhelming daily task list that leaves too little time for the fun stuff – analyzing results, optimizing performance, and strategizing your next big sale or campaign.

We’re lucky to have more opportunities than ever to engage our omni channel customers. Accenture reported that multi-channel customers (visiting a combination of our website, social networks, sales reps, and in-store) are 15% more profitable than digital-only customers and 25% more profitable than human-only experiences. The opportunity is huge, but means we’re creating more campaigns, analyzing more data, and ultimately, juggling more balls.

Sales teams also struggle with carving out time for high value tasks. A Hubspot survey found salespeople spend just one-third of their day actually talking to prospects. They spend 21% of their day writing emails, 17% entering data, another 17% prospecting and researching leads, 12% going to internal meetings, and 12% scheduling calls.

If you’re stuck on the execution hamster wheel, wishing there were more hours in the day, it’s time to adopt tools that automate manual tasks and make your teams more efficient. Today, we’re highlighting four areas technology delegates tedious day-to-day tasks, opening extra time and headspace to focus on the aspects of your business you enjoy – merchandising, business strategy, and strengthening your brand and customer relationships.

Business Intelligence

When your marketing or selling to an omni channel customer, cutting through the noise to reveal important data triggers, audience segments, or behaviors is hard. When you’re manually pulling and combining reports from different tools and systems, your reports become the burden eating up hours of your day, instead of the window into valuable, strategic insights.

A Business Intelligence (BI) tool can transform hours of manual reporting into valuable insights in minutes. BI tools, like Domo, instantaneously combines data from different sources and displays it in easy-to-digest visualizations. You’re no longer spending all your time compiling your report, you’re learning from it.

Take a peek at our sample BI dashboard to see how basics are revealed at-a-glance:

Once the data is set up, the dashboards provide a single, “universal truth” for your business, making you more efficient and proactive. (See how Ferguson Enterprises simplified their reporting process to minutes.)

Marketing Automation

You want every email to your customers to be personal, relevant, and compelling. You want every touch to demonstrate you value their relationship and understand their unique interests and place in the sales lifecycle.

It isn’t feasible to manually send a personal email to every customer after every interaction, but you can consistently touch your customers with relevant messaging and compelling offers using marketing automation. Some of our favorite automated emails include abandoned cart (of course!), browse or search abandonment, inventory close out, and welcome emails.

Product Data

If you’re in e-commerce, product data runs your world. Yet, many marketing and e-com teams still manage product data and images using USB drives and spreadsheets. Then, you have the formatting and data issues of managing different product specs for your website, digital catalogs, customer POS systems, and marketplaces, like Amazon. Even making a simple change becomes time intensive and error prone when you have hundreds or thousands of products and multiple channels to manage.

Automate your product data management process using a simple product information management (PIM) system, like Whereoware’s Product FastLane. With a PIM system, you can update product data and imagery from a simple dashboard, and schedule automated exports to share updates with your website, catalogs, and marketplaces. Get a PIM system and get out of spreadsheet hell.

Sales Automation

Like you, your sales reps struggle to balance a full plate of day-to-day tasks with the fun stuff – selling!

B2B business rules built into the application improve logistics, like shipment address verification, order minimums, real-time inventory, order entry, and customer service. These automated efficiencies mean less calls to customer service, more transparent operations, and fewer frustrated customers.

Automation Sets You Free

Take back your day! Affordable technology exists to help busy sales, marketing, and e-commerce teams do more with less, and take a “set it and forget it” approach to the manual tasks eating away your day.

See how the Pharos Product Suite empowers sales, marketing, and e-commerce teams to be more efficient and effective, while increasing sales.